Educate me!

Can someone provide some insight to The argument "eventually assembly level programmers will be replaced with compilers"

I am supposed to write a rather short essay defending my position as to whether the above statement is true or not, but after hours and hours of considering my opinion, I still sit here confused with the original statement. Why would assembly level programmers be replaced by a compiler? I thought assembly language was a low level programming language, and a compiler was what we used to translate that low level language to a higher level language such as C. How can something used to bridge the machine language to the programming language, replace the machine language? Or am I lookin at this wrong...

assembly language was a low level programming language, and a compiler was what we used to translate that low level language to a higher level language such as C

It is the other way around the compiler translate high level languages into low level languages. And thus when someone says "eventually assembly level programmers will be replaced with compilers" it, in my opinion, is false. A human expert will almost always produce more optimized code than a compiler. The only time, I believe, this will change is when P is proved equal to NP.

A human expert will almost always produce more optimized code than a compiler.

That might be true in some instances, but generally optimized assembly is completely unintelligible and very hard for humans to handle, while machines are pretty good (and getting better) at it. Except for writing compilers themselves, there usually is no reason to touch assembly nowadays.

Short answer, no. When a chip manufacturer churns out a new chip with new instruction sets and different registers and all that, someone has to read the manual and write the new compiler. Any existing programs that were made before that new instruction set etc. was created won't be able to use the new instructions.

Assembly level programmers won't ever be replaced. Someone ultimately has to write the compiler. If we could have a program that could write the compilers for new hardware, presumably by the method of reading the manual and swearing at the manufacturers (which is, I understand, the current human method) we'd have about five minutes to turn it off before it created a number of humanoid robots to start slaughtering us :)

But is there any kind of optimization that could not theoretically be done by a compiler?

I wouldn't be surprised if the CS chaps around here could come up with something. Some situation that a human can spot easily but a methodical program never could. Any CS bods around? I read French Poetry at university.